Scar Tissue

by William G. Tapply

  I nodded.

  “Hardly a year goes by,” he said, “that we don’t have something like last night. If not here, in one of the nearby towns. If I had my way, we’d change the legal driving age to eighteen, and we’d lock up any grownup who lets kids into their booze cabinet. It’s worse than guns, if you ask me. It’s killing our kids.”

  “Jake didn’t mention that the kids had been drinking.”

  “They’re always drinking,” he said.

  “But do you—?”

  “No,” he said. “No evidence of it. Maybe they weren’t. What difference would it make?” Sprague stole a glance at his wristwatch.

  “I know you’re busy,” I said. “But I have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

  He looked up at me. “Why? You contemplating a lawsuit?”

  I wasn’t, but the lawyer in me kicked in before I could tell him the truth. So I shrugged and smiled in a way that was intended to tell him: Sure. Of course I’m contemplating a lawsuit. I’m a lawyer, aren’t I? But I have way too much class to come right out and say it.

  He smiled and nodded, and I guessed he saw through me. “How can I help?”

  “How do you account for the accident?” I said. “Aside from the possibility of booze, I mean.”

  “High speed, narrow road, inexperienced driver? Who knows? Nobody saw it. The reconstruction guys’ll probably be able to make some sense of it.”

  “The girl—”

  “Jenny,” he said. “Jenny was her name. A sweet kid. She drowned, strapped in there behind the wheel. Tom and Emily—her parents—they’re in shock, as you can imagine.”

  “What about Brian?”

  He flapped his hands. “The car went through the guardrail and rolled over. It’s a steep bank, all rocky riprap. Landed upside down in about ten feet of water. Hitting those rocks must’ve sprung the door. Looks like Brian wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Probably got thrown out and hit the water unconscious. Or maybe he was dead already. The state cops had their scuba team here before sunrise, but no luck.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “They’re going to get some boats here to break up the ice downstream.” He pressed his lips together. “We’ll find him, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Something’s bothering me here,” I said.

  He arched his eyebrows.

  “Why is everybody so sure Brian was in that car?”

  Sprague shrugged. “Where else would he be? Both sets of parents said they left together. Friday-night date.”

  “Any chance he might’ve survived?”

  Sprague looked at me. “So where is he, then?”

  I nodded. “I guess if he wasn’t in that car, he’d be home with his parents.”

  “Obviously.” He hesitated. “Look. Everybody’s praying that Brian’s okay. But it makes no sense. It’s just wishful thinking. For one thing, his athletic bag was in the backseat.”

  “Brian’s?”

  Sprague nodded. “It had a couple changes of clothes and two hundred dollars in it. Jenny had a duffel in there, too. Also packed with clothes.”

  “As if—?”

  “As if they were going off for the weekend or something. I don’t know, and their parents didn’t say anything about it.” He smiled. “Kids, you know?”

  I remembered my two sons. I knew.

  “Anyway,” he said, “unfortunately, there’s not much doubt that Brian was in that car.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I took out a business card and handed it to him. “I’m really not interested in a lawsuit, Chief. I’m just a friend of the family, trying to help out, do whatever I can do to comfort them. They’re not going to start healing until Brian’s body is found. I hope you’ll keep me posted. And if anything comes up, any witnesses, any new information about what happened, let me know, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. He tucked my card into his shirt pocket. “Please, when you see Jake and Sharon, tell them that my prayers are with them, will you?”

  I nodded and stood up, and Sprague did, too. He walked me out through the waiting room, and we shook hands by the door. Then I went out to the parking lot.

  I paused to light a cigarette. All the clouds had been blown out of the sky. A blush of pink bled into the purple sky over the western horizon, and directly overhead a few stars had winked on. The wind rattled the bare limbs of the big oak trees that surrounded the green.

  I climbed into my car and headed for home. I drove more slowly and alertly than I usually do. I was thinking about Brian Gold’s accident, how a deer could jump in front of me at any minute, how a carful of drunken teenagers could come at me from around the bend, how I might not notice a patch of black ice until it was too late—how you never know what might happen in the next instant of your life.

  THREE

  I thought about Jake and Sharon all the way back to Boston. When I pulled into my slot in the basement parking garage of my apartment building on Lewis Wharf, I felt as if I’d swallowed a shot put. Jake had said it: I couldn’t imagine what they were going through. By comparison, Jenny Rolando’s parents were lucky. At least they knew their daughter was dead. For them it was all over, and they could start putting the pieces back together.

  I took the elevator to the sixth floor, unlocked the door to my empty bachelor’s apartment, and went in. I dropped my briefcase beside the door, and I was fumbling for the light switch when I noticed an odd, faintly fruity scent—cantaloupe, or maybe it was apricot. Then I heard the soft tinkle of harpsichord music and saw a dim orange light dancing on the walls of the hallway.

  Evie.

  I hung up my topcoat in the closet and went into the living room.

  Evie must’ve had fifty candles going. They were scattered around the edges of the room, on the floor, on end tables, on bookshelves, and lined up along the bottom of the glass sliders that looked out over the harbor. There were tall skinny candles in Chianti bottles, short fat ones in their own glass containers, little squat ones clustered on saucers. There were orange candles and plum-colored candles, raspberry, strawberry, and lemon-and-lime candles, and their fruity scents mingled, and they lit the room in a soft, flickering orange glow.

  It was Bach. The harpsichord. A Brandenburg concerto playing softly from the big speakers in the corners of the room.

  I felt fingers on the back of my neck. “Happy Groundhog Day,” Evie whispered. She hugged me from behind. Her arms slid around my chest, and one of them wormed its way inside my shirt. Her breath brushed my ear and her soft breasts pressed against my back. “I wasn’t sure how the pagans did it,” she murmured. “The music, especially. Bach doesn’t sound all that pagan.”

  I turned around and stepped back to look at her. In the candlelight, her hair was the color of maple syrup. It was wavy and thick and loose, and it fell halfway down her back. She was barefoot and wearing a sheer ankle-length white gown—some silky diaphanous material with short, puffy sleeves and a squared-off low neck. It hugged her bust, waist, and hips, then flowed like a waterfall around her long legs. In the backlit candle-glow, I could see that she was naked underneath it.

  I smiled at her. “The sacrificial virgin.”

  “We can surely pretend,” she said. She came to me and put her arms around my neck.

  I kissed her hair, then held her shoulders and pushed her gently away.

  She frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. I waved my hand around the room. “This is great. I just …” I felt my eyes start to burn, and I turned away from Evie, went across the room to the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, and pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

  Evie stood behind me. “What’s wrong, Brady?”

  I shook my head. I thought if I tried to speak, the tears would break free.

  “Maybe I should go,” she said.

  “No,” I mumbled. “Give me a minute.”

  She touched my shoulder, hesitated, then put her arms around me from behind and laid her cheek
against my back. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I cleared my throat. “I want to call my boys. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  I went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and pecked out Joey’s number. My younger son was a sophomore at Stanford. I looked at my watch. Seven-thirty. That made it four-thirty out there, where the grass was green year-round and flowers bloomed on Groundhog Day.

  After four or five rings, the recorded voice of one of Joey’s roommates said: “Frankie, Win, Joe, and Chuck aren’t here. Leave a message if you want.”

  I waited for the beep, hesitated, then hung up. My message would’ve been, “I love you, son.” But Joey already knew that.

  What I wanted was to hear his voice, know he was okay. He didn’t need a message from me. Kids don’t worry about their parents the way we worry about them.

  Billy, two time zones away in Idaho, wasn’t home, either, but at least it was his voice on the answering machine.

  I went back into the living room. Evie was huddled in the corner of the sofa. She’d wrapped my ratty old bathrobe around herself. She’d turned off the stereo and doused the candles and turned on a couple of lights.

  I sat beside her. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “This—” I waved my hand around the room “—it was clever and fun. Any other day but today …”

  She shrugged. “It was a stupid idea.”

  I leaned over and kissed her mouth. “It was an inspired idea,” I said.

  She peered solemnly into my eyes. “Do you want to tell me about it now?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  And I did. I told her about my call from Jake, about Sharon, about my talk with Chief Sprague, about what had happened to Brian, about the constriction in my chest and the awful thoughts that refused to stop ricocheting around in my head.

  “I’m sorry your boys weren’t home,” she said when I was done. “You’d feel better if you talked to them.”

  “Talking to you helps,” I said.

  She nodded as if she didn’t believe me.

  “I wouldn’t mind just being held for a while,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t mind that, either,” she said.

  We both drifted off to sleep tangled in the sheets and each other, and by the time we got around to cooking dinner it was nearly nine o’clock. Evie pulled on a pair of my baggy old sweatpants and an Asheville Tourists T-shirt that I’d picked up several years ago when Doc Adams and I went trout fishing in the mountain streams of western Carolina.

  We were a little awkward with each other. I’d meant it, about just being held, and we had not made love. I’d dozed and dreamed about my sons.

  Evie had brought lamb chops, which she said was the closest thing Bread & Circus had to goat, and a fifth of applejack. The package store had claimed it was all out of mead.

  In the kitchen, I rubbed rosemary and crushed garlic into the chops and coated my big cast-iron skillet with peanut oil to sear them. Evie scrubbed a dozen baby red potatoes and set them to boiling. While we waited to get the timing right, we tore up some spring greens in a big wooden bowl for our salad. We sipped applejack on the rocks with a twist of lemon as we worked, and we put on a Stevie Ray Vaughan CD, and it was homey and familiar there in my kitchen, preparing a Friday-night dinner with Evie.

  I’d met Evie Banyon about five months earlier. She’d hinted vaguely that she’d recently extricated herself from a bad relationship. I’d never pushed for details. She’d tell me what she wanted to tell me when the time was right.

  A year and a half ago, I’d lost Alex. That had been a good relationship, and I’d been nursing my guilt and misgivings. Evie had made it clear that she’d like to hear my story, but I told her there wasn’t much of a story, and she seemed content to leave it at that.

  Neither of us was really looking for an entangling alliance, but we had fun and respected each other’s secrets, and as those things seem to go when they’re not going badly, after a couple of months she started sleeping over on an occasional Friday or Saturday night, which gradually evolved into a more-or-less regular weekend routine.

  There were a lot of things we still didn’t know about each other. I liked the not knowing, and I liked gathering the bits and pieces as they emerged. Evie kept surprising me, and so far, at least, none of the surprises disappointed me.

  When our Imbolog repast was ready, we relit the candles, put the Bach back on the stereo, and took our feast to the table in front of the sliding glass doors. While we ate, we watched the tugs and barges and ferries, all showing their night lights, crawl around on the harbor below us. Planes, with their flashing lights, swooped over Logan in their landing patterns, and a steady stream of headlights paraded across the Tobin Bridge.

  Evie and I didn’t say very much. That was another thing I liked about her. She understood silence and didn’t take it personally.

  After we cleaned up, we took another glass of applejack into the living room. “Maybe I should go home,” Evie said after a few minutes.

  “I’m not much fun tonight, I know,” I said. “But I hope you’ll stay.”

  She smiled. “Okay. You talked me into it.”

  Evie was gone when I woke up on Saturday morning. She’d gathered up her candles and taken them with her, and she’d left a note on the kitchen table. All it said was: “Call me if you want.” She signed it with a few Xs and Os and a big capital E.

  I looked at the note, trying to read between the lines. She hadn’t said, “Please call me” or “See you tonight?” There were a lot of things she hadn’t said.

  After we’d eaten dinner I’d tried calling Joey and Billy again, but they still weren’t home. When Evie and I finally went to bed, I hadn’t felt like making love. She said she understood, but I’d sensed the hurt.

  I couldn’t get Jake and Sharon out of my mind.

  A high-pressure front had moved in behind the Imbolog rainstorm, and the Saturday-morning sky was high and blue and cloudless. Little whitecaps rolled across the blue water six stories below my apartment, and the sun shone pale and yellow and without warmth. When I stepped onto my balcony with my coffee, a frigid breeze drove me right back inside. It felt awfully damn wintry to me.

  Punxsutawney Phil got his weather forecasts right about half the time, the same as the television meteorologists. This time, it looked like he’d gotten it wrong.

  It was about ten in the morning. I called Jake’s number in Reddington. It rang five times before the answering machine clicked on. “Hi,” came Sharon’s cheerful voice. “Sharon, Brian, and Jake aren’t here right now, but we do want to talk with you, so please leave your number and we’ll get right back to you.”

  I did not leave a message. I wondered where they were, what they’d heard, how they were doing.

  I spent the morning trying to deal with the stuff that Julie had sent home with me for my weekend homework, but my mind kept flipping back to Reddington. I called the Golds’ house several times and got the answering machine each time.

  I tried Joey and Billy a little after noontime. Just as I figured, in their time zones they were both asleep, and I woke them up. Neither of them seemed to mind. I told them I just wanted to say hello and restrained myself from saying what was really on my mind: I wanted to know they were okay.

  After talking with my boys, I was able to concentrate on my paperwork a little better. But Jake and Sharon still lurked in the corners of my mind, and they were not answering their telephone.

  Finally, around two in the afternoon, I said the hell with it.

  Traffic was light on the Mass Pike, and it took about half an hour to get to Reddington. A black-and-white Ford Explorer with a light bar on the roof and the Reddington Police logo on the door panels was parked in the Golds’ driveway, so I pulled up on the side of the street. The Explorer’s motor was running and somebody was sitting behind the wheel.

  I’d just started to get out of my car when the front door opened and Jake and Chief Sprague came out.
Jake was in shirtsleeves. The Chief wore a bomber jacket and blue jeans and leather boots. The two of them paused on the front porch. Jake looked down at his feet, and Sprague gripped his hand with both of his and spoke to him for a long moment.

  Jake nodded. Sprague leaned close to him and said something else, and Jake looked up and shrugged. Then he saw me. He lifted his hand and waved.

  Sprague came down the walkway, and I met him halfway.

  “Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Hello, again.” He held out his hand.

  I shook it. “Anything new?”

  He shook his head. “Afraid not.”

  “Brian?”

  “No. I’m sorry.” He jerked his head back at the house. “Jake and Sharon aren’t doing very well. Maybe you can cheer them up.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “No,” said Sprague, “I don’t, either.”

  He got into the passenger side of the cruiser. The driver, I noticed, was McCaffrey, the redheaded cop I’d met at the station. I waved to him, and he raised his hand. Then he backed out the driveway, and they drove away.

  I went up onto the porch, where Jake was waiting for me with his arms folded across his chest.

  I gave him a hug. “No news, huh?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “We finally turned the ringers off the phones. All night they were calling. Friends, well-meaning, I guess, but we didn’t feel like talking to anybody. I would’ve called you. I kept waiting, hoping I’d have something to tell you.”

  “It’s okay, Jake,” I said. “Maybe this is a bad time … .”